Civil war, “the worst kind of war,” marks the beginning and the end of the modern age.⁶³¹ A ghostly, derisive epiphany of the god Terminus, it suddenly points to the limit of what had been declared as a negation of the limit. The modern age is great when it subjects a supposed truth to close scrutiny and consequently rejects it. The modern age is murderous, with an unprecedented wealth of resources, when it claims to have discovered a truth. Carl Schmitt demonstrated once and for all that, to avoid the fury of religious wars, the appropriate answer was to reject the justum bellum. As a result, the delicate passage from the justa causa belli to the justus hostis has given rise to “the amazing fact that for two hundred years there has been no war of annihilation on European soil.”⁶³² During this brief period, jus publicum Europaeum was combined with the introduction of the Modern State: the machina machinarum, the “first modern machine as well as a solid precondition for all other technical machinery.”⁶³³ The “guerre en forme”—a cruel formal game of war that was safeguarded, however, by the strictness of its rules—brought a new unity to a certain space (a particular part of Europe) that became synonymous with civilization itself. Then the game disintegrated from within. In August 1914, a war began that seemed like so many other dynastic quarrels—and instead it turned immediately into the first technical war, whose structure denies all possibility of guerre en forme. So, too, the revolutionary war also makes its appearance, the final variant of the war of religion, the ultimate of all civil wars. The modern, most effective, most destructive, form of truth is tautological: that which is revolutionary is right because it is revolutionary; with it the question of justa causa belli is revived and finds a brisk response. One of the many ironies, one of the countless misconceptions resulting from the world being placed under the protective cloak of the West, is that when Iran raises the Islamic call to holy war it will already be a parody of the revolutionary war—and the Western intelligentsia will have no difficulty in recognizing it as its own. At least, at the beginning … The full and radiant truth of faith is subjected to the procedural and tautological truth of the West in its extreme form, and this is happening at the very moment in which the rejection of the West is being declared. At least, at the beginning …

Just as Walter Benjamin viewed the baroque drama from the window of the expressionist morgue, so Carl Schmitt viewed the religious wars through Walther Rathenau’s bloodstained fur coat, through the exploits of Ernst von Salomon’s outlaws, and through the wagonloads of banknotes during the Weimar inflation. But in doing so he noticed a pattern that had always previously been ignored: the ephemeral constellation of jus publicum Europaeum, preceded and followed by a massacre, which at first had been called war of religion and today has many names—above all because there is no longer any clear way of distinguishing guerre en forme from all-out war, or all-out war from civil war, or civil war from revolutionary war, or revolutionary war from “global civil war,” which encapsulates and preserves all previous categories.⁶³⁴ Korea and Vietnam: early examples of distant and localized civil wars that involve the two great powers, with a military apparatus equal or superior to that deployed in the world wars. The Arab-Israeli war: a civil war that is also a war of race and religion, and offers a permanent theater of negotiation for the powers. Terrorists who hijack or blow up aircraft thousands of miles away from their enemy: an act of contempt that recalls the eradication of nómos from every land and the establishment of an order that has no foundations and therefore has no limits, but means that the theater of war, at whatever moment and in whatever place, becomes the killing of some hostis injustus, preselected or picked out at random.